She had spent her whole life performing the exact not-seeing that the family required, and it had hollowed her out and made her mean, because a person who has to keep that much knowledge locked away from herself has very little softness left over for anyone else.

When she found that folder and finally let herself know what she had always half-known, what broke on her face was not just the discovery of her father’s crimes.

It was the discovery of her own life — the recognition that every instinct she had ever overridden had been correct, that she had spent two decades as an accomplice to her own deception, that the meanness she’d aimed at me had been, all along, the overflow of a much larger thing she could not let herself feel.

I did not forgive Sienna for two years of small cruelties.